Friday, December 15, 2017

Starting in June 2016, I watched and
reviewed every winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, or
in short, Best Foreign Film (BFF), in reverse chronological order from the 2015
entry to the awards inception in 1947 (watching the 2016 winner at the end). Part of the experiment was to see how many of these I would be able to find. In
most cases, I was able to borrow the DVD of each film from the Cuyahoga County Library
system (a consistently top rated system in Northeast Ohio), and as things went further back in time, that meant using the
inter-library systems CCL employs, SearchOhio and OhioLINK.I did have to watch a couple on the dusty old VCR.On two or three occasions when I couldn’t
find the movie through the CCL system, I was able to get DVDs from the
Cleveland Public Library.Once I paid $2
to watch a movie on Amazon, and that was the grand total of money I spent on this project.I did find a couple rare films online, having
exhausted every other possibility.Only once was I not able to find a film at
all, at least with English subtitles, and that was 1950’s The Walls of Malapaga.I
watched it only in French with Portuguese subtitles, and decided to review it
anyway.

My reviews were intended for people
who don’t normally watch foreign films, a group that included me not all that
long ago.I found a lot of the movies
worth watching, not just ones you might see at an art house, but movies I am
convinced would have been mainstream American favorites had they been in
English.I also sat through a lot of
tedious, self-admiring crap that got awards for having the right political or
social view to the voters of the Academy.But enough about The Sea Inside. My goal was to make the reviews be entertaining, especially when the movie wasn't, and to give American viewer something they could relate to.

The list here is my amateurish attempt
to rank what is perhaps the unrankable.There
are a variety of genres and so many different cultures represented here that it
is almost unfair to compare them against each other. But I did anyway, and the films are listed below from best to worst.Click any movie title to read the review. You can follow me on Twitter at @hawley5150.

In Death
of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s tragic 1949 play, Willy Loman
loves his sons, probably more than himself, but doesn’t know when to let their
failures be their failures, and not his.The Salesman, 2016’s Best
Foreign Film winner, has its own Willy Loman character, a teacher and actor
named Emad.Like Willy, Emad will have a
difficult time understanding that he can only control so much, and that as much
as he may love his family, it is not always his place to protect them from
their own difficulties.

Emad and Rana

Emad and his wife, Rana, live in an apartment
building that is literally falling apart.And when I say literally, I mean literally—one night they are forced to
evacuate because it seems like the foundation has shifted and the whole
structure may come down on them.The
couple have a friend named Babak who helps to set them up in a place where the
former tenant had unexpectedly bailed, literally leaving everything behind
her.And when I say literally, I mean figuratively,
because you can’t leave everything
behind.But this woman, it seems, left
more than her material things in the apartment she abandoned, as Emad and Rana
will soon learn.

Emad is a teacher of boys in a high school in
Iran.The kids think the world of him,
like Robin Williams’ students do in Dead
Poets Society.They jokingly call
him a “salesman,” because his other job is as an actor in a local theater,
where his is starring as Willy Loman, with his wife as Willy’s wife Linda.Emad and Rana clearly adore each other, and
cheerfully are setting up themselves in their new place.

Their relationship will get tested, though, when
one day Rana, alone in the apartment, responds to the apartment bell by buzzing
in her husband, leaving the door slightly ajar and going in for a shower.Only it turns out it isn’t her husband at
all, and the next thing you know, Emad is walking into the apartment to find
blood on the shower floor and his wife nowhere to be seen.He learns from neighbors that she was taken to the hospital,
assaulted by the person Rana had let in.Rana will eventually be okay, at least physically.

Hey Babak, maybe you coulda told us a hooker lived there!

This is where Emad has difficulty.Rana doesn’t want to report the incident, and
Emad does.He feels like she should
either report it so the police and handle it, or else drop it altogether. This strains their relationship.Emad
does some investigating, and it becomes apparent that the former occupant was a
prostitute.Learning this also strains
Emad’s friendship with Babak, whom he feels maybe could have mentioned that
the previous tenant was a hooker.Emad will struggle with this situation with
agony:He loves his wife and feels like
he failed to protect her.But like the
guy he is portraying in Death of a
Salesman, he must understand that the past is the past, and that his family
has their own choices, and potentially mistakes, to make.

This is the second Best Foreign Film for Iran, both directed by Asghar
Farhadi and starring Shahab Hosseini, who gives a wonderfully understated performance
as Emad.As in 2011’s A Separation, Farhadi allows the main
turning point in the film to be muted, allowing the consequences to be the focus
of the drama.In that film, Hosseini’s
character gently pushes a pregnant woman out of his apartment, and we only
later see how life-altering this event will be.In The Salesman, the assault
happens off-camera, but the tension builds gradually afterward, as Emad deals
with how his wife feels and his own need for vengeance.Taraneh Alidoosti is excellent as Rana, more
Biff than Linda in this story, having had to deal with a painful experience and
needing to handle it on her own terms.

What if you can't walk away? I guess that's when it's tough

Farhadi has a knack for telling a simple story with simple
characters, while raising complicated and thought-provoking questions.In The
Salesman, one of those complicated questions posed is when is it time to
walk away?Because if you can't, that
is when it gets tough.

The Title: فروشنده‎ (in Persian),
or Forušande.Emad is the not a salesman
by any meaning of the word, except that he plays Willy Loman in his
neighborhood theater.He is not the
loser that Loman is, but like Loman, he acts irrationally, thinking he is
helping his family.The title of Miller’s
play is itself a major spoiler—Emad’s fate is not in question, but his
relationship with his wife is.

The culture:As with A
Separation, what struck me most with this film was its looking people on
the other side of the world, seemingly so different from us as Americans, and
putting them in situations that we can identify with. Emad is a good man, and he is lucky to have
such a partner as Rana, but his temper and his inability to check himself may
lead to him losing her.

Agenda danger:Famously, the director and actors boycotted
the Academy Awards as a result of President Trump’s order temporarily blocking
entry in the U.S. of Iranian citizens, as well as citizens of six other
countries.But this film has no
political agenda or message.It’s most
controversial message is in pointing out the difficulty in communication
between men and women, and in looking at when it is appropriate to forgive.

Best Picture that year:La La Land.Spotlight.

Rating:This is the most recent Best Foreign Film
winner, and as such, my last My BFF Project review.It is a great note to go out on.Most early winners of the prize, from the
1940’s on, with the exception of some Japanese films, tended to be Italian,
French, or otherwise European.The Salesman, the second Iranian winner
of the prize, is characteristic of American appreciation of film throughout the
world (strangely though, India has never won the award).What makes The Salesman so interesting is how American it is, right down to
the Miller play that lends it its title.Like what I consider to be the best Best Foreign Film winners, it
provides a window into life in a place Americans may not be familiar with, and
does so in a way relatable to folks who may have never lived more than a few
miles from their birthplace.Films like The Salesman are the reason more
Americans should be willing to read subtitles when they go to the movies.